African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity

By Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning. Looking at two widely diverse cultures, the Idoma in Nigeria and the Samburu in Kenya, Kasfir makes a bold statement about the links between colonialism, the Europeans' image of Africans, Africans' changing self representation, and the impact of global trade on cultural artifacts and the making of art. This intriguing history of the interaction between peoples, aesthetics, morals, artistic objects and practices, and the global trade in African art challenges current ideas about artistic production and representation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 24, 2007
• ISBN: 9780253022653

Book preview

African Art and the Colonial Encounter

African Expressive Cultures

Patrick McNaughton, editor

Associate editors

Catherine M. Cole

Barbara G. Hoffman

Eileen Julien

Kassim Koné

D. A. Masolo

Elisha Renne

Zoë Strother

African Art AND THE Colonial Encounter

Inventing a Global Commodity

SIDNEY LITTLEFIELD KASFIR

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

Publication of this book is made possible in part with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research, education, and public programming in the humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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© 2007 by Sidney L. Kasfir

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield.

African art and the colonial encounter : inventing a global commodity / Sidney Littlefield Kasfir.

       p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-34892-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-253-21922-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Samburu (African people)—Material culture. 2. Idoma (African people)—Material culture. 3. Art, African—Western influences. 4. Great Britain—Colonies—Africa. 5. Spears—Kenya. 6. Colonies in art. 7. Exoticism in art. 8. Art and globalization. I. Title.

DT433.545.S26K37     2007

305.896'33—dc22

2007007408

1   2   3   4   5      12   11   10   09   08   07

For Melania (Aduke) and Elisabetta (Omolabake),

who grew up with masquerades and lmugit

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Colonial Power and Aesthetic Practice

PART 1. Warriors

1.  Maa Warriorhood and British Colonial Discourse

2.  Idoma Warriorhood and the Pax Britannica

PART 2. Sculptors and Smiths

3.  Colonial Rupture and Innovation: The Colonizer as Inadvertent Patron

4.  Samburu Smiths, Idoma Maskmakers: Power at a Distance

PART 3. Masks, Spears, the Body

5.  Mask and Spear: Art, Thing, Commodity

6.  Warrior Theatre and the Ritualized Body

PART 4. Commodities

7.  Idoma Sculpture: Colonialism and the Market for African Art

8.  Samburu Encounters with Modernity: Spears as Tourist Souvenirs

9.  Samburu Warriors in Hollywood Films: Cinematic Commodities

REPRISE: The Three C’s: Colonialism, Commodities, and Complex Representations

CODA: From Spears to Guns in the North Rift

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Books have their own stories quite apart from their published contents. When I first began putting together the ideas for this one in 1994, I wanted to address some of the big questions in African art that had surfaced since my graduate school days. The dominant ideas from the 1960s and ’70s were about theories of style and genre (Fagg 1965, 1970; Sieber 1961, 1966; Sieber and Rubin 1968; Fraser and Cole 1972; Picton 1974; and Bravmann 1973), aesthetics (Thompson 1973; later Abiodun 1983 and Hallen 2000), performance (Thompson’s paradigm-shifting African Art in Motion, 1974), and artistic process (Cole’s 1969 series of articles on Art as a Verb in Igboland). All of these except the minefield of style were derived wholly from on-the-ground evidence from Africa and couched in functionalist assumptions (e.g., the internal coherence of traditional communities and their symbolic practices). My academic generation began in the ’80s to expand upon (and, in the case of style and notions of the traditional, to question) these ideas in detailed field studies of particular art and ritual genres (Cole and Aniakor 1984; Drewal and Drewal 1983; Nunley 1987; Lawal 1996; Ross 1998; Strother 2000). By then these studies were also enriched by ’70s feminist anthropology and occasional departures into structuralism, especially in architectural studies (Blier 1987) and masking (Jedrej 1980).

There is a telling disjuncture between art history and anthropology in how generational influences have played out in the study of African art in the United States. In Europe, the academic study of African art usually resides in anthropology departments, but in the United States and in Africa itself, it is typically found under the disciplinary umbrella of art history or in art schools connected to universities. During the 1970s, a senior group of Africanist art historians at Yale University, Columbia University, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, UCLA, the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and UC–Santa Barbara trained a cohort of students who have now taken their places.

But an equally influential triumvirate of Africanist cultural anthropologists—James Fernandez in Gabon (1966, 1973), Simon Ottenberg in Nigeria (1975, 2006), and Warren D’Azevedo in Liberia (1973, 1980)—all students of Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University, although they trained few successors in the African art field, nonetheless provided the structural-functionalist template for in-depth village-based African fieldwork for almost all of us. Their more recent counterparts in urban art and popular culture have been Johannes Fabian (1996) and Bogumil Jewsiewicki (1991), anthropologist and historian respectively, who have been working in Lubumbashi since the ’70s. The shift in theoretical model has been beneath the surface but has been emblematic of the shift in interest among the emerging scholar generation from an ethnically defined and mainly rural to a class-defined, primarily urban subject-world, not only in African art history but in African anthropology as well.

At the same time that members of my academic generation began to publish their first work, the broader fields of art history and cultural anthropology began to be strongly affected by what was happening in literary theory and by the intrusion of cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Levi-Strauss, the intellectual cult figure of our student generation, was dethroned by other French theorists, most notably Bourdieu, Derrida, and Foucault. Reflexivity created a crisis around the idea of fieldwork itself, so much so that by the ’90s, most of my own graduate students had abandoned village-based artists for their urban counterparts and the rural mud compounds with their resident lineages for the heterogeneity of the African city. The shift also embraced the study of postcolonial genres, leaving behind the diviners, masqueraders, and sacred kings in their symbolic spaces for the study of postcolonial urbanites and their hybrid arts and spectacles, some high, others low, and many of them migratory.

The high-art category has been theorized and brought to center stage by a group of mainly African transnational artists and intellectuals, foremost among them Salah Hassan (1995, 2001), Okwui Enwezor (2001), Ikem Okoye (1996), Sylvester Ogbechie (forthcoming), Olu Oguibe (1996), and Chika Okeke (1995). Like William Fagg, Roy Sieber, Robert Farris Thompson, and Herbert Cole a generation before, all but Okoye and Ogbechie have used exhibitions and their catalogue essays in preference to books to establish their most important claims. Foremost among these is Enwezor’s contention, made in the blockbuster Short Century exhibition, that African modernisms developed along with anticolonial political movements, not through grateful art students in some donor-recipient model of progress. Implicit in this is a powerful critique of current, mainly European, collecting and exhibition practices that assume that only popular art (art based outside the academy) can be the legitimate heir to the art of the premodern African past and that the productions of formally trained artists are little more than an ahistorical mimicry of Western modernism. This position was largely demolished by 1995 with the Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa show at Whitechapel Gallery in London, but until the Short Century exhibit at p. 5. 1, the Museum of Modern Art’s Queens, New York, affiliate in 2001, no persuasive model of African modernism had been put in its place.

Modernism, the posts (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism), and now transnationalism and globalization—the new modernization—have become the intellectual horizon upon which new work in African art is largely situated. The New York–, London-, and Paris-based museum/dealer/collector art-world of traditional genres has been left to the older generation to continue to study and analyze. For collectors, this is a slowly shrinking inventory of work by anonymous dead artists (Morphy 1995). Nonetheless these older genres are still widely accepted, both by the museum-going public and by the institutions that own and display them as the paradigmatic African art, even if fewer people are actively engaged in their study. Some (I include myself) are dismayed by the younger generation’s abandonment of interest in the premodern African past; others welcome it as a break with the old salvage paradigm of colonial anthropology. But writing this book confirmed for me that I was not yet finished with it, particularly the early-to-middle British colonial period from the 1880s to 1930s in which this comparative history is initially located. At the same time, modernity, especially the emergence of an international globalizing market in African art, was an equally important part of the story. My question then became how to frame this narrative to encompass both.

My doctoral thesis at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1979 was an attempt to write Lower Benue Valley, especially Idoma, art history through the institutions of masking and sacred kingship. I did this by focusing on the key migrations, rituals, and Fulani jihadist and British interventions that had been deployed to construct a modern Idoma identity. In 1991, I left off working in Nigeria to begin research in Kenya’s semi-arid North Rift with Samburu blacksmiths and pastoralists and their own encounter with modernity. Initially I was confident that pastoralists didn’t have masquerades and that their aesthetic practices were a different matter from those of West African yam farmers. Not only that, I felt that their encounter with modernity was different from any in central Nigeria. But the longer I worked in Kenya, the less certain I was of these distinctions, and I began to think comparatively about the two groups. The result is this book, which looks closely at the way colonialism (and in the case of the Samburu, their overlapping discovery by tourists, filmmakers, and photographers) affected warriorhood and its aesthetic practices in these two very different places where I have done sustained fieldwork.

Although neither Robert Farris Thompson nor Herbert Cole was my teacher, their work on mask performance and artistic process, respectively, are very clear intellectual debts. I have based my equating of Samburu warrior theatre with Idoma warrior masquerades on Thompson’s principle that icon defines itself as act: both Idoma and Samburu assemblages of form and performance are kinds of masks. I have also relied strongly on Herbert Cole’s notion of African art as processual in order to understand the ways blacksmiths and sculptors were able to create new forms in the face of repressive colonial regulations meant to put them (or at least their clients) out of business.

In order to simplify a complex undertaking (early colonial through postcolonial time periods, two cultures), I have structured the comparison in four parts: warriors and warriorhood (chapters 1 and 2), the artists and artistic processes involved in representing them (chapters 3 and 4), the objects themselves (masks, spears, the decorated body; chapters 5 and 6), and the commodification and subsequent globalization of objects and of warriorhood itself (chapters 7, 8, and 9).

The introduction presents both the historical setting and the major art-historical issues the book addresses. These include the ways artisanal knowledge (that of Samburu blacksmiths and Idoma sculptors), embedded in particular cosmologies and cultural scripts, was related to systems of objects (weapons, masks) and how these undergirded cultural practice (especially the ritual system and the patronage of artisans). It discusses the classificatory problems that ensued when Western museums and collectors began to subsume these objects into their own systems of classification. The chapter also introduces the idea of warrior theatre, using the metaphor of the script to describe the construction of masculinity through body arts, masquerade, dance, and comportment.

Chapter 1, after briefly comparing nineteenth-century inscriptions of East and West Africa, develops the representation of Maasai warriorhood in the nineteenth-century accounts of Krapf and Thomson and then considers government and settler texts from 1901 to the eve of independence (1963). These focus on the idealization of Maa-speaking pastoralists as fearless, self-assured, and both mentally and physically superior to other Africans—in a word, like us (us being the British settler aristocracy). The second part of the chapter presents a case study of (Maa-speaking) Samburu warriorhood through government documents of the Powys murder case in 1931, attempting to show how the treatment of Samburu moran was depoliticized and embedded in a discourse of pastoralist warrior behavior. The actors in this drama included virtually everyone on the 1930s colonial stage in Kenya—politically prominent white settlers, colonial administrators, Samburu moran, and numerous other interlocutors. The chapter argues that the case was less about the murder of a white man than about the spatialization of power in the contested landscape of the Pinguan, which was being encroached upon by settler farms, and that it was useful to the government to frame the spear-bloodings by moran as adolescent mischief.

Chapter 2 explores the Idoma case by first embedding it in a West African nineteenth-century imperial discourse of white malaise, headhunting, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and fetish worship. It links the establishment of Lugard’s policy of indirect rule to the establishment of a Department of Anthropology in the Northern Nigerian provincial administration in 1924, which attempted to inscribe the customs of the Idoma as seen through Hausa interpreters. The chapter attempts to reconcile my Idoma informants’ views of the Oglinye masquerade with the colonial documents and the discourse of earlier explorers, especially that of Burdo. It traces the absorption of the Oglinye and Ichahoho masquerades into the aiuta, a law enforcement constabulary. In this way, councils of elders acted to preserve the martial character of Oglinye while stripping it of some of its antisocial aspects. The 1880s–1908 period was followed by the imposition of the Pax Britannica (1908) and the ban on headhunting (1917) and their effects on the Oglinye masquerade. Ultimately the British had to rely on the secret societies to maintain law and order, whether they wanted to or not.

Chapter 3 explores the effect of the Samburu spear ban and the proscribing of the Idoma Oglinye masquerade on blacksmiths and carvers, respectively. Far from limiting their possibilities to innovate, these conditions actually stimulated innovation by introducing new patronage and (in the Idoma case) by redefining warriorhood itself. Samburu smiths began making spears for Turkana and Rendille, which in turn modified practice. Later, with the onset of the post-colonial border war with Somalia, these changes in design became ingrained by necessity. (Still later, the introduction of tourist patronage in the encapsulated form of game park safaris made one type of spear into a souvenir and an aesthetic rather than utilitarian object; this is explored fully in chapter 8 on commodification.) Idoma carvers transformed the former practice of using trophy heads of victims into the practice of using wooden masks in Oglinye masquerades. In doing so, they fundamentally altered the Idoma cultural script. By aestheticizing Idoma warriorhood, they made it into a symbolic statement about manhood; this was made possible only by the ban on headhunting. In this sense, the Idoma only finished what the British started.

Chapter 4 uses the well-known inscriptions of the African blacksmith as a powerful other or pariah in nineteenth-century and colonial narratives to explore the differences between the myth and practice of the smith. It also examines the internal discourse within Samburu culture regarding the smith as other and presents the smith’s own discourse of his power. It notes that warriorhood crosscuts smith and nonsmith in Samburu culture and supersedes it as a marker of identity. Finally, it approaches the paradox of the smith’s status (socially low, ritually high) as part of the larger question of the paradox of the artisan’s status and explores its implications for carvers as well as smiths.

Chapter 5 shifts the focus from smith and sculptor to their objects in order to offer a set of arguments about how masks and spears can be read outside their historical narratives. It begins with a consideration of all material objects as texts and asks the question: If they indeed speak, how does what they say differ with the various audiences, both local and far, who apprehend them? The same concerns spill over into the Western museum classification of art and artifact, which have no grounding in the cultures that produced the objects being classified. And finally, it asks: What difference, if any, does it make when either art or thing becomes commodified? Or becomes a souvenir?

Chapter 6 takes Idoma and Samburu warrior roles as instances of the ritualized body, defined here to include the body and its embellishments and disguises. It argues that the mask is an extension of the ritualized body, particularly that class of masks that have their origin in the trophy head. In Samburu, the ritualized body of the warrior extends beyond his weapons and decorations to his spear, upon which he carries part of the victim’s body as metaphor for his own virility. The chapter also explores hairstyles and painting of the body with ochre as important ways of constructing social and sexual masculinity.

Chapters 7 and 8 contrast the mask and spear in new systems of exchange. Chapter 7 explores the Idoma case, in which geographical isolation and an absence of tourism has limited commodification to the dispersion of a limited inventory of original masks and figures to either colonial district officers or trader middlemen. It brings other mask-producing cultures in West and East Africa (e.g., Senufo, Dogon, Maconde) into this comparison, since the commodification of masks is both common and follows the same dynamic as that of Samburu spears. Chapter 8 describes the commodification since the early 1980s of one type of Samburu spear as a souvenir in response to safari tourism. Expanding on this idea, it deals with so-called tourist art in relation to notions of art, artifact, and souvenir and compares the various current discourses on authenticity that are applied in the wider system of exchange where these objects now circulate.

The ultimate postcolonial commodity is the Samburu warrior himself as subject of postcards, tourist snapshots, and commercial Hollywood films. The final chapter analyzes the Samburu appearance in and experience of making two Hollywood films shot on location in Africa, The Air Up There and The Ghost and the Darkness. Finally, it applies these experiences to the representation and self-fashioning of contemporary Samburu warriorhood in an attempt to demonstrate that they are a means by which the marginalized pastoralist competes in Kenyan political discourse as well as the cash economy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this book has spanned almost my entire career, so my indebtedness is to many people and institutions. My early intellectual mentors Nelson Kasfir, James Fernandez, and John Picton guided me to and through graduate school and my initial Idoma fieldwork. In Nigeria, the late Ajene Okpabi, Och’Idoma II, and the late Ekereke Odaba, Och’Akpa, not only sheltered me for several years but also put me through, as Nigerians like to say. Justice Paul Anyebe relished the role of devil’s advocate and greatly sharpened my ability to distinguish sense from nonsense. Robert G. Armstrong, S. O. O. Amali, and Erim O. Erim provided the platform of modern Idoma scholarship on which I was able to erect my own ideas.

In Kenya, my husband Kirati Lenaronkoito has accompanied me on every interview for the past fifteen years. His ideas and his knowledge of Samburu custom and colonial history underlie much of the book’s substance and have brought it alive. I have also relied greatly on the exemplary work of Paul Spencer, Michael Rainy, John Galaty, Corinne Kratz, and Susan Rasmussen for their modeling of pastoralist social relations and the issues of hierarchy, distance, and reciprocity. Roy Larick’s work on Samburu smithing and smelting and Atieno Odhiambo’s study of the Powys murder case also figured crucially in my interpretations, as did Neil Sobania’s history of the Lake Turkana region. The best personal insights into Samburu character and the late colonial milieu (Clark Gable and Ava Gardner included) came from Terence Gavaghan, district commissioner in the early ’50s, and from the photographs of Nigel Pavitt over a 30-year period.

Institutional support for research at various stages came from the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Jos, the University of Ibadan, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, Emory University, the Social Science Research Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation. At Emory, Ivan Karp read the first version of the book, and several years later, my graduate seminar read the last. I particularly thank my graduate students for lobbying to retain the movie chapter when it was in danger of being jettisoned. Two anonymous reviewers greatly improved the book’s organization, and my Indiana University Press editor, Dee Mortensen, and copyeditor Kate Babbitt helped me to distinguish the woods from the trees at all levels. But without my daughters Elisabetta, who organized my evacuation by the Flying Doctors Service after a near-fatal road accident in Samburu district, and Melania, who came to Kenya to bring me home to the United States, this book truly would never have seen publication. It is dedicated to them with love.

African Art and the Colonial Encounter

Introduction

COLONIAL POWER AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE

A Masai warrior is a fine sight. Those young men have, to the utmost extent, that particular form of intelligence that we call chic:—daring, and wildly fantastical as they seem, they are still unswervingly true to their own nature … and their weapons and finery are as much a part of their being as are a stag’s antlers.

—ISAK DINESEN, Out of Africa (1937)

The South was, for the most part, held in thrall by Fetish worship and the hideous ordeals of witchcraft, human sacrifice and twin murder. The great Ibo race to the East of the Niger… and their cognate tribes had not developed beyond the stage of primitive savagery.

—FREDERICK LUGARD, Report on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria (1919/1968)

Where does the new come from in an artist’s practice? In this book, I explore an unexpected source, colonial authority, and trace the ways widely different late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European impressions of Kenya and Nigeria and the subsequent British colonizing policies toward their imperfectly understood subject peoples intervened in and transformed the objects and practices of two groups of African artists. Equally, this book is about the ways those artists—sculptors and smiths—reinvented these objects and created a new artisanal practice. Because the two cultures, Idoma in Nigeria (one of Lugard’s cognate tribes) and Maa-speaking Samburu in Kenya, are geographically remote and superficially very different, the common thread of the institution of warriorhood helps weave the comparison. At a more immediate level, this book is also about real people—the warriors, the artists, and the blacksmiths—and how they strategized and made choices to circumvent the authority of colonial rule and to create new forms.

HEADHUNTING, SPEAR-BLOODING, AND THE BRITISH

In 1976, near the beginning of my Idoma fieldwork, the Akpa district head led me to a large tree overhanging the Otobi village playground and pointed out where enemy heads were once displayed. That same year, my diviner-carver friend Ojiji told me, We do only three things here: farm, hunt and play.¹ He left out fighting, which was forcibly suppressed under the British pacification around 1910. But things are never that straightforward. There were no more Idoma warriors in the literal sense, but there were the plays. The colonial government passed a law in 1917 making headhunting a crime punishable by hanging (an irony not lost on the chief), but the forbidden trophy heads resurfaced as carved likenesses. Many Idoma say that when masquerades (in this case, a warriors’ dance with decorated human crania) are outlawed by authorities, they don’t cease to exist but return to the bush instead. The bush is the home of masks.

In 1931, on the opposite side of the continent, a group of Samburu warriors speared a lone white man at a place the Samburu call the Pinguan, which was north of Mt. Kenya, where white settler farms encroached near Samburu grazing lands. They left the body, which was later consumed by lions, but they took the head as a trophy. If it had been a traditional enemy, they would have mutilated the corpse and taken the genitalia instead. Because the farm’s owner was a British aristocrat with connections in high places, the case was taken all the way to Whitehall. In retaliation, the colonial government placed a ban on Samburu warriors carrying spears for more than twenty years. The warriors responded by concealing their spears in the bush, an area of thousands of square miles of semidesert and montane forest the government in faraway Nairobi could not effectively police. The bush became the home of spears.

When I first heard the 1931 story in the early days of my Samburu fieldwork, I wondered what, other than the taking of a head as a piece of flamboyant warrior theatre, the Samburu case might have in common with the Idoma one. This book is partly an attempt to understand these two cases’ shared experience of colonial power and their construction of masculinity within its limits in these widely different situations. It is also an attempt to draw the aesthetics out of these two sets of warrior practices, one of which, the Idoma Oglinye masquerade, is perceived by Western museums and collectors as art because it involved fashioning a representation, the enemy head, in wood. By contrast, the focus of attention in the Samburu case has been on the warrior himself with his weapons and decorations, who through his persistence over time is usually seen by Western (and also elite Kenyan) spectators as a living anachronism and artifact of a dying world. Both cases are embedded in practices in which the warrior’s youthful daring is paired with the visualization of his masculinity through behavior and dress. I use their highly self-conscious sense of theatre to argue that both deserve to be thought of as masquerade.

FIGURE INTRO.1. Ojiji, an Idoma carver, diviner, and Anjenu priest, Otobi, Nigeria. Photo by author.

THE COLONIZATION SCENARIO

It was a useful strategy for the Foreign, and later Colonial, Office to represent the Idoma and their Middle Belt neighbors as headhunting pagan tribes compared with the residents of the North, which was dominated by civilized Muslim emirates the British preferred to deal with. The subordination of Idoma rulers such as the Andoma of Doma to the Emir of Lafia and the Ots’ana of Keana to the Emir of Nasarawa, as well as the creation of a previously nonexistent Och’Idoma south of the Benue River and his induction as a paramount chief into the Northern House of Chiefs were all ways of maintaining indirect control while attempting to overshadow or preempt the local authority of the secret societies, their mask organizations, and the ancestral cult.

But the British did not have to do this preempting alone, because the Fulani had begun the Islamization process in the nineteenth century. In northern Nigeria and the Middle Belt, the jihad of Uthman dan Fodio that began in 1804 had already established the power of the reformist Fulani emirs before the British arrived. Both the spatial and temporal dimensions of these two civilizing (and globalizing) thrusts overlapped in crucial ways: spatially, the jihad progressed southward from Sokoto toward the Benue. Its cavalry was eventually rendered ineffective by the Benue River, but it infiltrated northern Yorubaland and converted the Igala king, the Idomas’ closest historical partner. Overlapping these events at mid-century, British and other explorers came up the Niger from the coast and the former began establishing trading and missionary stations as far north as the Niger-Benue confluence. Finally, in 1903, British troops conquered the Sokoto caliphate and by 1910–1915 had pacified the unconverted peoples south of the Benue. Lugard later announced his policy of indirect rule, which depended for its success on viable (and preferably centralized) local structures of governance.

The situation in East Africa, in particular the region that was to become the Kenya colony, had its parallels (Muslim rulers of city-states along the Swahili coast, barbarians inland), but an entirely different colonizing discourse developed there, in part because its temperate climate and sparse population and the presence of wild game in huge numbers made it highly desirable for white settlers. Beyond this, the barbarians did not fit the West African model at all—they were not headhunters, fetishists, cannibals, or practitioners of human sacrifice. Rather they were tall, aristocratic-looking cattle nomads, Rousseau’s noble savages inhabiting a Golden Land. For these groups, who had no centralized authority figures, indirect rule was replaced by a sparsely administered group of outposts where wild game were often more numerous than the natives.

FIGURE INTRO.2. Courage, strong men of Kroo! Source: Adolphe Burdo, A Journey up the Niger and Benueh (1880).

But in both cases there were warriors requiring pacification, to be followed by some form of administrative control so that they did not interfere in the extractive processes of the palm oil (and later other) trade in Nigeria or the coffee- and tea-producing white settler farms in Kenya. The institution of warriorhood, because it was embedded in both the ritual system and the system of objects, works here as the point of comparison for precolonial and early colonial inscriptions of Idoma (in Nigeria) and Maasai-Samburu (in Kenya) cultural practice as well as for the colonial and postcolonial commodification of warriorhood’s principal cultural symbols through a globalized trade in art and artifact. The transformation of these symbols and the aesthetic practices that created them occurred within three successive time frames: the eve of colonialism in Kenya and Nigeria, ca. 1890–1900; the period following World War I when the British policy of indirect rule in Nigeria created an official interest in customs a decade after the Pax Britannica had suppressed practices that contravened the civilizing mission; and the period since World War II in which international art, craft, and souvenir markets affected artisanal practice in much of the continent.

REPRESENTATIONS, ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE, AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE

While this story reads at one level as a straightforward colonial incursion narrative accompanied by an empire fights back counternarrative, it can also be read at a deeper level as a story of innovative aesthetic practice in the face of a radically altered patronage system. The strongest thread running through both the historical and aesthetic narratives concerns representation: first, the widely divergent British official representations of warriorhood in the two places (Lugard’s primitive savagery in Nigeria versus a district commissioner’s adolescent mischief in Kenya); second, the changing representation of warriorhood’s objects as art or ethnographic specimen and finally as commodity; and in the end, the image of the warrior himself, on movie screens, on postcards, in coffee-table books, and seen from a Land Rover while on safari. The earliest are written inscriptions such as travel narratives, memoirs, and colonial reports—the more recent ones produced in the camera’s eye. But all of them speak to iconic power and the use of representations as a rhetorical medium in both colonial and postcolonial spaces.

These representations are not simply free floating but are connected to both knowledge and practice. As David Scott (1999, 12) observes, colonial representations constituted an archive of authoritative knowledge [much of it wrong or misleading] through which colonial subjects were narrowly perceived and acted upon. For example, in representing the Maasai as people who think as we do, unlike the typical native, whose thought patterns twist and turn in all kinds of queer channels where we can’t follow(quoted in Huxley 1948/1975, 240), the Kenyan settler could justify indulgence toward Maasai behavior. In Nigeria, by contrast, colonial officials such as C. K. Meek seamlessly conflated headhunting with cannibalism, even though one was a common mode of fighting and the other a rare and usually highly ritualized practice, such as the new Yoruba king ritually consuming the heart of his dead predecessor. In doing so, it became easy to attribute a barbaric otherness to southern Nigeria and justify repressive measures there.

In a parallel way, representations and productions that result from actual artisanal practice also depend on an archive of knowledge that colonialism, in different instances, expanded or foreclosed upon. In my own work, the best-known and most widespread example is surely the eclipse of iron smelting everywhere due to the importation of ready-made mild steel by colonial governments. The remains of iron-smelting furnaces at Taruga, near the Doma (Idoma) kingdom north of the Benue in Nigeria have been dated to as early as the fifth century BC (Tylecote 1975). Throughout Idomaland, district officers reported the recent remains of smelting furnaces in the early colonial period (Armstrong 1955). That these furnaces and their attendant technologies should have remained in active use well into the twentieth century was proof of their essential role in production and as a rich source of symbolism for other kinds of processes in the societies that created them. Amazingly, such knowledge has all but disappeared in the space of barely three generations (that is, from the 1920s to the present). In both Nigeria and Kenya, iron smelting had ceased by the early to mid-1930s, not long after the two regions were brought under British administration.

When I first began to spend time with blacksmiths, I imagined knowledge as something that accrues and is cumulative but less often as a thing that can be lost through lack of use and subsequent forgetting. Since then I have recorded accounts from a number of old Idoma and Samburu smiths, born around the turn of the twentieth century, who could give detailed descriptions of their furnaces and smelting procedures. All of these men are now dead, and their knowledge exists primarily as ethnographic texts. So to ask what the blacksmith knew is to ask a pointedly historical question—one whose answer changed radically over the twentieth century. For in both Idoma and Samburu, the smith was also the smelter of iron. In shedding the smelter’s role under colonialism, he left behind an important mythic dimension of his identity—that of the bringer of civilization through iron tools and weapons who can manipulate earth, air, and fire to his own ends. In Samburu, the residue of that power still exists in the blacksmith’s ability to invoke a curse and his distancing as outsider.

Artisanal knowledge and aesthetic practices are filtered in various ways, and this was as true in the colonial period as it is now: if the carver’s patronage base is not exclusively local, his knowledge of it may be filtered through an intermediary, and when that happens, the intermediary frames the knowledge to suit his or her interests. The reverse is also true, and consumers frequently derive their knowledge of the artist and his/her production through intermediaries rather than directly. This nowadays creates mythologies among producers who are divorced from the distribution and consumption of whatever they produce as well as corresponding mythologies among consumers who are similarly distanced (Appadurai 1986, 48).

For example, Kamba carvers in Kenya produce not only naturalistic animal sculpture but also napkin rings with animal heads on them to be sold in craft outlets there and abroad. Since they do not participate in the culture of napkin ring usage themselves, most have no idea what function these objects have for their far-off consumers and have invented a variety of interesting explanations—child’s toy, baby’s bracelet—of what Europeans must do with them. Western consumers create parallel mythologies about African artists and their production: the more distant they are, the easier it is to create narratives to support either the uniqueness or the sameness of their objects and the exoticism of their practice (see Spooner 1986).

Representations act as filters in both directions, but not in symmetrical ways. Most often (again from Appadurai’s classic 1986 essay Commodities and the Politics of Value in The Social Life of Things), the collector comes from a complex capitalist economy and the faraway artist/artisan from an informal economy that exists on a much smaller scale. In the first case, not only is knowledge fragmented among many categories of consumers, producers, and intermediaries but knowledge of commodities is also itself commodified in the form of credentialed expertise (1986, 54). The elite collector of African art does not rely solely on personal judgment but consults appraisers and specialists before buying, thereby creating not just one but a whole cluster of representations concerning authenticity, distinction, and value.

There is no doubt that British popular and literary representations of Kenya and Nigeria acted as filters in the enforcement of colonial policies, but uncovering the aesthetic account that lies beneath the historical one means recuperating not only artisanal knowledge but also the practices that embodied this knowledge. Artisanal knowledge is a very complex thing—part technical, part epistemic and cosmological, part representation and mythology, part accidental and idiosyncratic, but all of its parts are brought into play in the gelling of the artist’s practice.

Practice can be described, following Bourdieu, as the outcome of a dialectic between sociocultural structure and a structuring habitus, the external and the embodied (1980/1990, 52–65).² When modernity intruded in the form of colonialism, new structures forced changes in practice, whose implementation called upon existing competencies that I equate with habitus. For example, the making of iron and brass ornaments was traditional smith’s work. In the late nineteenth century, brass rods were plentiful as a staple of ivory- and slave-trading caravans. In turn, they supplied smiths with a usable model for the working with other imported metal; all he needed to do was alter the form to fit the new material’s unique characteristics, such as greater or lesser malleability and tensile strength and differing aesthetic properties such as luminosity and patina. With the intrusion of colonial goods, it was a short step for the Samburu smith from learning to repair imported aluminum cooking pots to cutting them apart into strips to make bracelets and leglets for women to wear.

On the other hand, some older practices remain side by side with new ones because the combination of knowledge, patronage, and available materials still exists to make them happen. Wives of Samburu smiths possess a knowledge of how to heat and draw brass or copper wire and urauri, the double-coiled copper or brass earrings worn by elders of both sexes as well as by laibartok (newly circumcised initiates), are still being made today.

At the same time, the smith’s artisanal knowledge has broadened to comply with a new kind of practice, the upkeep and repair of machines—cars, trucks, motorcycles—that were initially brought by the colonizers. In both Kenya and Nigeria, bush mechanics are often blacksmiths, pressed into this new occupation by their own special competence in working with metal. It is this competency coupled with inventiveness that has enlarged the smith’s repertory of practice at the same time that his historical knowledge has shrunk.

The most recent reconfiguration of artisanal practice has taken place in a small Samburu enclave of warriors on the Kenya coast far from the strictures of their caste-based existence in northern Kenya. Here both objects and artisanship are redefined in the context of a new patronage system created by tourism. At the coast, boundaries are effaced not only between gender-based artisanal practices such as beadworking but also between casted lkunono and noncasted members of the same warrior age-set. Finally, the system of objects itself is reconfigured to create the entity of the tourist spear, modeled after the smaller-sized youth’s spear in the traditional weapon repertory. To an observer,